Post-Pandemic Recovery of Adult and Pediatric Cochlear Implantation Rates Within the United States

To characterize the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on national cochlear implantation (CI) rates and model the timeline for correction of this backlog.

A cross-sectional analysis of the Epic Cosmos database was used to identify patients that underwent CI from 2015 to 2023. Demographic information, geographic region, and urban-rural code were collected. Poisson and negative binomial regression were used to model and compare future case counts and rates.

About 30,402 patients were included. While annual implant rates have returned to the pre-pandemic baseline, compared to expected growth had the pandemic never occurred, it will take until 2026 for the rate to fully normalize and until 2029 for the backlog of cases to be eliminated. Stratifying by age, normalization of CI rate will take longer for older adults (≥ 80 years, 2032), compared to younger adults (18-64 years, 2024). Patients living in urban areas have faster recovery of CI utilization compared to those in rural areas.

The pandemic had a long-lasting impact on our national rate of CI administration. Our study suggests that it will take over 5 years to return to our pre-pandemic rate of surgery and almost a decade before we work through our post-pandemic backlog of CI surgeries. However, this recovery has not been even across all demographic groups.

III.